Friday, September 25, 2015

When Israel was one large refugee camp

The current refugee crisis in Europe has evoked memories among Jews in particular. More often than not, the comparison is made with Jews desperate to flee the Holocaust. Overlooked
is the fact that in Israel's early years, refugees, mostly from Muslim countries, outnumbered
residents. Lyn Julius writes in the Huffington Post:

Israel itself was one large refugee camp in the 1950s and
1960s. The sight of row after row of tents filling our TV screens
recalls the ma'abarot, hastily erected "transit" camps of
fabric tents, wooden or tin huts. These were conceived by Levi Eshkol of
the Jewish Agency to provide temporary housing and jobs. The first ma'abara was established in May 1950 in Kesalon in Judea.

In 1964 1.3 million Israelis went to see the cinema box office hit Sallah Shabati
-- a satire about a bearded Yemenite immigrant who has just arrived in
the promised land with his seven children and pregnant wife. Sallah --
played by Topol, who would later achieve global fame as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof -- uses all his wiles to try and make money and move into better housing. His name is a pun on words: "Sorry I came".

The
EU as a whole, with a population of over 300 million, is taking in as
many immigrants today as Israel, a country of half a million, absorbed
in the early 1950s. As well as 100,000 Holocaust survivors, the tiny
struggling country took in 580,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
By the 1960s, the refugees had tripled the country 's population.

Children playing in a ma'abara

These
Jews were destitute, escaping violence and persecution in Arab
countries with nothing but a small suitcase and the shirts on their
backs, having been stripped of their livelihoods and property. They had
often left behind flourishing businesses and comfortable homes. There
was no question of a "right of return" to countries where mobs went on
the rampage shouting "Itbach al-Yahud" ("Slaughter the Jews"), money was extorted from them and they could be arrested on the slightest suspicion of being a "Zionist spy". The UN did nothing to ease the burden, and still today, the world remains oblivious to these refugees' existence.

Conditions
were deplorable. Too hot in summer, too cold in winter, exposed to the
wind and the rain. Everything from food to detergent was rationed.
Refugees had to line up to collect water from central faucets. The water
had to be boiled before it could be drunk. The public showers and
toilets were rudimentary.
The 113ma'abarot housed a quarter of a million people in 1950. Slowly the ma'abarot turned into permanent towns. Some residents stayed in the camps for up to 13 years.

Often the newcomers had no say where they were resettled. Large numbers, especially North African immigrants, ended up on the country's periphery in
dusty development towns in the Negev desert or on the Lebanese border.
Western immigrants secured housing in the cities of the coastal plain,
food and jobs through personal contacts which the immigrants from Muslim
lands lacked. Yiddish speakers were given preference over the
easterners when it came to employment. Such was the shortage of jobs
that some Moroccan refugees were made to cart grass from a neighboring
kibbutz to Ashdod beach.*

In spite of lingering resentments, the
absorption of one of the largest numbers of refugees in proportion to
the host population has been an astonishing success. Later, Ethiopian
refugees and a million Soviet Jews brought their own challenges. By
then, however, the country was a great deal more prosperous, and the
refugees were sent directly to absorption centers. They were encouraged
to attend total immersion courses in Hebrew and given money to help them
afford a permanent home.

Sallah Shabati
captures the culture clash between the petty Ashkenazi (western)
bureaucrats and the eastern refugees. Political parties come to the ma'abara
to court people who have never lived in a democracy for their votes.
Sallah himself has to climb a steep learning curve. The refugees press
on and build new lives for themselves. Sallah's children fall in love
with Ashkenazi kibbutzniks next door, prefiguring the 25 percent intermarriage rate in Israel today. It's a story with a happy ending: no matter the tribulations, Sallah is not sorry he came.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Naughty do not compare, What did the Yishuv think would happen when the State of Israel came into being.That the Arab states would allow their Jewish citizens to continue to remain in their homes, I think you are naive. But allowing for 'realpolitic' to then treat these refugees like shit is and was unforgivable.And then to make a film that makes light of this ill treatment of Jewish communities who had existed for 1000's of year. The sense of arrogance of the East European Western Elite was mind blowing especially when you consider their so called superiority was no different from their neighbors who had quiet happily sent millions of the fellow countryman to the gas chamber. The first generation of these communities who were born in the 'promised land' were stripped of all their heritage and brought up like good little yekkies.It is only in the past 10 years that the Sephardi communities have reclaimed their ancient heritage, we now have middle eastern music, we now eat middle eastern food.. we are in the middle east not a suburb of Berlin

Topol making pleasant films whether it be Israel or in Eastern Europe does not make them realty

To anonymous. This reply is coming from someone who is of mixed Ashkenazi and Sephardi (not Mizrahi) heritage. I agree with most of what you said. However, when you allude to Sallah Shabati, I have to differ. That film is a satire. And satires do what satires do. If anything, it also shows the utter arrogance of the Western Ashkenazim. "Sorry I came" is an aptly named title that captured the anguish of the Mizrahim. Except for a minority, most of the Mizrahim that I met were, and are, anything but "good little yekkes". And I can tell you from personal experience that their ancient heritage was starting to be reclaimed since the early 80s, not in the past 10 years. This process is still going on however. I'm still waiting for the Palestinian Jews, who have lived in Israel for thousands of years collectively, to reclaim THEIR heritage.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)